Summary of Work: The purpose of this agreement was to support the collection and analysis of data on cause of death and characteristics of the last year of life in the planning of the 1992 Pretest and 1993 Main Survey of the 1993 National Mortality Followback Survey (NMFS), conducted by NCHS, CDC. This survey will supplement information from death certificates in the vital statistics file with information on characteristics of the decedent. The pretest examined approximately 800 deaths of individuals aged 15 years and over who died in 1992. The main survey examined approximately 22,951 deaths of individuals aged 15 years and over who died in 1993. This includes 884 deaths to centenarians. Collection of field interview data has been completed, and a preliminary death certificate/informant (DC/I) file has been delivered to the NIA/EDB by the NCHS in July of 1997. This file contains information keyed from the death certificate file and the informant interviews. Data from the final 1993 mortality file has been merged with the DC/I file and stripped of personal identifiers to form a working file. Post-stratification adjustment factors and non-response adjustments have been developed to form the final sample weights for each file record. EDB staff have begun analyses on the preliminary file to check for undetected errors and to make recommendations to NCHS for production of the final analysis file, which is anticipated to be available in January 1998. At that point final analyses of the data file will begin. NCHS has concluded agreements with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) to link the NMFS data with administrative records from those two agencies. The linking with both SSA and HCFA is well under way. The SSA has been able to verify ( or correct) the social security number for about 98 percent of the decedents. Additional information from the death certificate and the informant questionnaire is in the process of being collected to help identify the outstanding two percent of decedents with a missing or inappropriate social security number. Once appropriate social security numbers have been established on the DC/I file, a subset will be generated to independently link with SSA and HCFA data. The subset will consist of all DC/I records for which the informant has given permission for a link to be made. Analytic plans will look at trends in reported lifetime history of conditions between the 1986 and 1993 NMFS, examination of lifestyle factors related to death at very old ages, hypotheses regarding decreased use of health services in the last years of life among the very old, and use of linked data from HCFA to study compression of morbidity among the oldest old.